Officials Fear Terror on High Seas
Sept. 9, 2003 — -- Piracy at sea, far from being a forgotten relic of the world's buccaneering past, is now a modern growth industry.
In the first half of this year, pirates attacked 234 ships, an increase of almost 40 percent over seaborne assaults reported last year to the International Maritime Bureau. What is more, pirates are becoming more violent and are adopting more sophisticated techniques — involving patrol boats, mother ships, modern communications and automatic weapons.
The trend worries not only ship owners, crews and insurers, who pay the price; it is becoming a major concern to security officials and navies from Singapore to San Francisco. The reason: The pirates' advanced methods provide a potential model to international terrorists seeking so-called soft targets for attacks that could take thousands of lives, cripple world trade and provide a powerful symbol of destructiveness.
An ABCNEWS investigation has uncovered the increasing fears in shipping and security circles that armed terrorists may, as pirates already do, seize ships carrying liquid natural gas, chemicals or oil. But, rather than rob a ship, they could transform it into what a sea captain in Malaysia, Raja Kumar, calls "a floating bomb."
Detonating a tanker in a port city like Singapore, Galveston, Texas, or Boston would wreak havoc, take thousands of lives and damage the environment for years to come.
"The worrying trend is the possibility that some of these attacks are linked to international terrorists," said Tony Tan, the deputy prime minister of Singapore.
Tan, who is also Singapore's chief coordinator of security and defense affairs, said he fears the city-state's container port — one of the largest in the world — could be a specific target.
Last year, Singaporean police arrested Muslim suspects who had zeroed in on an American warship, locales used by American servicemen and foreign embassies on surveillance videotapes discovered in a safe house in Afghanistan.
A Breeding Ground for Pirates and Terrorists
With much of the Muslim world angered by American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well by U.S. support of Israel, Islamists are looking for ways to strike out at the United States and its allies. Muslim fundamentalists are especially active in the South China Sea, along the shores of the Malacca Strait and in the southern Philippines.
These areas are also home to large numbers of pirates. Poverty and political instability make Indonesia and the Philippines fertile recruiting grounds for both pirates and fundamentalist movements.
Actions at sea are nothing new to al Qaeda, which attacked the USS Cole off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, and may have been responsible for an explosion that set the French oil tanker Limburg alight in the same waters two years later.
Al Qaeda is believed to have links to an underground Islamist movement in the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf, which has attacked ships in Philippine waters. Security experts say it also has contacts with Islamic groups in the two Muslim countries along the Malacca Strait, Malaysia and Indonesia. Two-thirds of the world's cargo and half its oil exports travel through the strait, and Indonesia's shores saw more pirate attacks in the last year than any other country in the world.
Two incidents underline the threat. In March, armed men seized the Indonesian chemical tanker Dewi Madrim in the Malacca Strait. They robbed the ship, but they also spent an hour steering it through the strait. Why?
"There's a very strong possibility that we're looking at the equivalent of a flight training school for terrorists," said Dominic Armstrong, a maritime expert for Aegis Security in London.
The second act of piracy that did not fit the usual criminal pattern was the seizure of an oil tanker, the Penrider, near Malaysia in August. Pirates attacked the ship and took three crew members hostage. The owners paid $100,000 for their release, but government officials in Malaysia said the money went not to pirates, but to an Islamic guerrilla organization in Indonesia. The accused group, the Free Aceh Movement, denied the charge. However, the Free Aceh Movement has previously ordered all ships coming near the Aceh shore of the Malacca Strait to ask its permission to pass.
Who Will Pay to Police the Oceans?
Part of the problem is no country is willing to bear the cost of providing a force to police the oceans. Alan Chan, head of the Petroships fleet in Singapore, is demanding an international force to patrol the world's most dangerous waters.
One of Chan's ships, the Petro Ranger, was hijacked and taken to China in 1998. The Chinese authorities released the pirates without charge, confiscated the oil cargo for "expenses" and let the ship return to Singapore. After another incident, in which a Chinese crew was murdered, the Chinese government has been much harsher on pirates, sentencing some to death.
In the United States, the Coast Guard has created six SWAT teams since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to counter terrorist threats from the sea. It is also requiring ships approaching American harbors to give 96 hours' notice, up from the previous one-day notification.
How likely is an attack by ship on America's shores? Rear Adm. Kevin Eldridge, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's 11th District off California, told ABCEWS, "It's likely enough for us to put a lot of effort into planning for it."
But despite that planning, Eldridge is still concerned. "There aren't enough ships, there aren't enough planes for us to set up a picket line, so that we know what's coming," he said. "We're pushing our borders out. Frankly, if we have a vessel in our port that has a problem, it's too late."
A Ship Explosion Could Cause Massive Damage
How much damage could a ship do? An explosion in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917 gives a clue. A French ship, the Mont Blanc, carrying munitions for the Western Front, collided near Halifax with the merchant ship Imo on Dec. 6, 1917. The impact set off the Mont Blanc's powder, killing 1,900 people immediately in the small Canadian town. There were 9,000 injuries, and almost the entire northern part of the town — more than 300 acres — was destroyed.
During World War II, two munitions carriers, the Bryant and Quinalt Victory, exploded dockside at a naval port in San Francisco Bay. More than 300 crew members and dock workers died. The University of California's seismograph measured the blast as a small earthquake, equal to 5,000 tons of dynamite. That is more or less the power of the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima. A similar incident in a densely populated port city like New York is the Coast Guard's worst nightmare.
Has there ever been a suicide bombing by ship? The tactic was used against pirates, when, in 1804, the new U.S. Navy was besieging the port of Tripoli to suppress North African piracy.
Commodore Edward Preble's gunships proved ineffective against Tripoli's massive city walls, so he ordered the USS Intrepid to sail up to the city's fortress packed with explosives. Master Commandant Richard Somers and 12 volunteers set out in fog on the evening of Sept. 4, 1804. Suddenly, their ship blew up well short of its target. All of the American seaman were killed. No one discovered why the ship blew up, but Preble insisted his men had done it themselves to avoid capture. If so, they were the sea's first suicide bombers.
